We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“‘Pass the turkey, Mother […] the poor birds can hardly walk. Miserable freaks.’ This, too, was intended as a dig at my father, the enterprise being another of science’s excesses, like cloning or whisking up a bunch of genes to make your own animal. Antagonism in my family comes wrapped in layers of code, sideways feints, full deniability.”

This quote exemplifies how the Cooke family approaches conflict passive-aggressively and sets up the fact that Rosemary’s father is an especially contentious figure in the family. The quote also introduces the concept of animal ethics in the realm of science, suggesting that the family takes issue with science as a whole and perhaps more specifically, scientific procedures done on animals.

“So I told Harlow about a summer when I was little, the summer we moved from the farmhouse. It’s a story I’ve told often, my go-to story when I’m being asked about my family. It’s meant to look intimate, meant to look like me opening up and digging deep… It starts in the middle.”

This quote is a callback to the opening line of the book, in which Rosemary tells the reader that the middle of her story begins in 1996. This quote provides explanation for Rosemary’s repetitive action of starting in the middle of stories: the middle is a safe place to start. The middle is not a real, findable, place, but rather the part of the story that Rosemary can tell without revealing compromising details about herself.

“This doesn’t mean that the story isn’t true, only that I honestly don’t know anymore if I really remember it or only remember how to tell it. Language does this to our memories—simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.”

Rosemary’s transparency about the failures of her memory, and memory in general, makes her an unreliable narrator. Arguably, it also makes her an honest and therefore trustworthy narrator. Thus far, the parts of Rosemary’s story that have been told are the “oft-told” parts, so this quote foreshadows possible errors or oversimplifications in Rosemary’s story and memory.

“And that right there is the difference between me and my brother— I was always afraid of being made to leave and he was always leaving.”

Little is known about Rosemary’s brother so far, and this quote provides a hint as to why. Understanding more about Rosemary’s brother’s actions also helps the reader understand the remaining family members’ dynamics and Rosemary’s own motivations; Rosemary’s tendency to play things safe can be seen as a response to both her brother and sister leaving her.

“No one seems to care that Fern was being mean, though that seems to me to be the crucial bit… The things I can do that Fern can’t are a molehill compared to the mountain of things she can do that I can’t […] This is why I invented Mary, to even the score. Mary could do everything Fern could and then some.”

This scene, in which Rosemary’s father and his students are taking notes on Fern laughing at Rosemary’s pain rather than tending to Rosemary, shows a clearly problematic situation in which the drive for new scientific findings overpowers the father’s parental instincts towards empathy and kindness. This creates a dynamic in which Rosemary feels that she has to compete for love and affection from those around her and prove herself as interesting and worthwhile as her sister is to her father and the students; the lack of external validation that Rosemary receives drives her to create an imaginary friend.

“He was a great believer in our animal natures, far less likely to anthropomorphize Fern than to animalize me. Not just me, but you, too—all of us together, I’m afraid. He didn’t believe animals could think, not in the way he defined the term, but he wasn’t much impressed with human thinking, either.”

It is clear that Rosemary’s father was an overpowering and potentially egotistical presence in the household, because she consistently cuts into her own narration to insert her father’s beliefs. This particular belief of her father’s provides a framework in which humans live and make choices based on things like instinct, nurture, or nature, rather than rationality and free will.

“Here is the question our father claimed to be asking: can Fern learn to speak to humans? Here is the question our father refused to admit he was asking: can Rosemary learn to speak to chimpanzees?’”

This quote sums up a dilemma that the book returns to: What questions can science answer, especially when intangible things like love and interspecies communication are involved? Fowler also examines where the boundary is between Rosemary and Fern. As a child, Rosemary feels so close to her sister that the boundaries between their minds and bodies often appear blurred. There is occasionally a sense of this in Rosemary’s adult life, too, when she feels as if her inner chimp is coming out.

“I came to understand that all of my verbosity had been valuable only in the context of my sister […] One day, every word I said was data, and carefully recorded for further study and discussion. The next, I was just a little girl, strange in her way, but of no scientific interest to anyone.”

Rosemary’s childhood propensity for speaking constantly and learning fancy, new words is explained by this quote: She was able to garner attention and feel important by speaking because the grad students were obligated to write it down. When Fern is taken away, young Rosemary learns that what had previously made her feel validated is no longer valued by the adults around her, necessitating a personality change.

“At dinner, I adopted my usual strategy of saying nothing. The spoken word converts individual knowledge into mutual knowledge, and there is no way back once you’ve gone over that cliff.”

Despite Rosemary’s childhood verbosity, which is emphasized throughout the beginning of the book, she settles into a silent adulthood. This quote exemplifies the anxiety that Rosemary feels around her family, adopting “strategies” and avoiding going over “cliffs” in order to ensure that her parents do not fall into another depression. Bottling knowledge up inside of herself feels like the safest option for Rosemary.

“So I can’t prove that I’m different from you, but that’s my best explanation. I infer this difference from the responses of other people. I assume my upbringing is the cause. Inference and assumption, smoke and Jell-O, nothing you could build a house on. Basically, I’m just telling you that I feel different from other people. But maybe you feel different, too.”

This quote shows a technique used throughout the book, in which Rosemary directly addresses the reader. This breaking of the fourth wall allows the reader to feel wholly engaged with the book, as if they are a part of it and lets the reader compare themself to Rosemary. This quote is also a good example of Rosemary’s voice as a protagonist: unsure, whimsical, expository, and at times, looping.

“‘Bonobo society,’ he said, ‘is peaceful and egalitarian. These laudable qualities are achieved through continual and casual sexual congress… Lysistrata had it backward. The road to peace is through more sex, not less.’ This went down well with the male students. They were surprisingly okay with being told, by inference, that they were simple creatures entirely controlled by their dicks.”

Dr. Sosa interprets bonobo society in a way that supports human patriarchal ideals; this does not appear to be a scientifically rigorous decision. Rosemary notices that, for all the ways that humans try to differentiate themselves from nonhuman animals, men are happy to align themselves with primal sexuality.

“I refuse to be lower status than that insufferable twit. I refuse to smile. I’d rather die.”

This quote references Dr. Sosa’s lecture, in which he told the class that in chimp society, all female chimps are inherently lower than any male chimp. Here, a high Rosemary aligns herself with chimp society, believing that engaging with this man’s condescension will prove to him that she is of a lower status. Before this point, adult Rosemary has been rather unsure of herself and her purpose, so this commitment to a cause is noticeable.

“I couldn’t not see how I’d been put, drugged, into a cage just the way she’d once been put, drugged, into a cage. I was confident of my release come morning and I wondered if she’d also been confident. It was far worse than imaging her frightened, to think of her certain that this was all a mistake and we were on our way to rescue her, that she’d soon be home in her own room and her own bed.”

Through being incarcerated, Rosemary is forced to think of her sister, whom she knows is also inside a cage. The sameness of their circumstances emphasizes the not-sameness of their circumstances: Fern will never be released. While cages are often seen as necessary for animals and are different then jails, this quote puts the two on the same level, which raises questions about the ethics of cages.

“I was happy then, and happy now, lying on my bed remembering this. How one night I’d gone to fairyland with my brother, and the very best part was that he’d had no particular reason to ask me along, nothing he’d needed me to do. He’d brought me with him just because.”

This is one of the few purely happy memories that Rosemary recounts in the book; most of her memories are tainted with jealousy or anxiety because of her role as a part of an experiment. Throughout her life, Rosemary desires unadulterated love from Lowell but rarely gets it because of his focus on Fern. Rosemary can hold onto this memory as a time when there was truly no other intention on Lowell’s end than showing his little sister something beautiful.

“I watched her pick up a bit of bread and throw it at Lowell, smiling that dazzle of teeth. In an instant, I was four years old, left behind on the ground while Lowell and Fern climbed the apple tree, laughing. ‘You never choose me,’ I was shouting at Lowell.”

The feeling of being left out, or chosen second, has haunted Rosemary since her childhood, and she is immediately triggered by her brother’s attraction to Harlow and decision to bring her out to dinner. This scene is yet another instance of Rosemary’s emotional needs not being met because of her sister. It is also a scene in which, as her father has suggested is often the case, the rational response (seeing your sister you have not seen in a decade) is overpowered by the instinctual response (a sexual attraction).

“Dad was always saying that we were all animals, but when he dealt with Fern, he didn’t start from the place of congruence. His methods put the whole burden of proof onto her. It was always her failure for not being able to talk to us, never ours for not being able to understand her. It would have been more scientifically rigorous to start with an assumption of similarity.”

Lowell critiques their father’s scientific approach for assuming too much difference between nonhuman animals and human animals. What Vince might call rational or scientific, Lowell perceives as unjust and closeminded. This difference in opinion is an important theme in the book, with Lowell’s viewpoint suggesting that our expectations of nonhuman animals limit our capacity to learn and connect with them. Lowell believes that humans create barriers to separate ourselves from animals, but that learning to be more like animals could benefit human society.

“Now I searched through my weariness, into every breath, every muscle, every heartbeat, and found a reassuring, bone-deep certainty. I loved Fern. I had always loved Fern. I always would… but as far back as I could remember, I’d also been jealous of her. I’d been jealous again, not fifteen minutes past, learning that Lowell’s visit had been for her and not me. But maybe this was the way sisters usually felt about each other.”

Throughout this story, Rosemary is lost, without purpose, unsure of herself, and searching for answers. This scene is important because an answer to a question that Rosemary has not even been able to formulate comes to her. Rosemary is able to come to an understanding of her relationship with her sister where both love and jealousy can exist mutually.

“In Lowell’s defense, he’d struck me as crazy. Real, run-out-of-medication crazy. I know I haven’t conveyed that. I’ve made Lowell sound more lucid than I found him. I did so out of love […] Maybe crazy isn’t quite the right word, after all—too internal. Maybe traumatized is better. Or unstable.”

This is an example of Rosemary breaking the fourth wall by acknowledging that she is making editorial choices to inform how the reader will interpret something. She shows that stories, like memories, are not objective and immobile, but rather living and able to change.

“In point of fact, Thomas More doesn’t advocate doing away with cruelty to animals so much as hiring someone to manage your cruelty for you. His main concern is that the Utopians keep their own hands clean, which has turned out to be pretty much the way we’ve done it, though I don’t think it’s been as beneficial to our delicate sensibilities as he’d hoped.”

Rosemary brings up Thomas More a few times throughout the book as a way to discuss animal ethics. Even More, who wrote a fictional work to lay out the idea of utopia, could not conceptualize a world in which animals are not harmed in some way, showing how integral harm against animals is to the construction of humanity.

“On the previous evening, while I’d celebrated the end of the quarter with an early bedtime, Ezra Metzger had tried to break into the primate center at UC Davis […] he’d managed to open eight cage doors before he was stopped. In the newspaper later, anonymous UC officials described the monkeys as traumatized by the intrusion […] The saddest part of the news story was this: most of the monkeys had refused to leave their cages.”

Cages and imprisonment are recurring symbols and themes in this text. While the humans who enter cages in this text know when they are to be released, the animals do not and for the most part never will be released. This juxtaposition highlights a major difference in the treatment of humans and nonhuman animals. The effect of imprisonment is shown in this quote: The monkeys are too traumatized from all of the tactics used to keep them under control to leave their cages when they are given the chance. It is clear that Ezra’s activist effort is not fruitful, but further traumatizes the animals.

“I realized that I did know who I was. In the face of that screen memory, still vivid enough in my mind to subvert the whole concept of memory with the efficient, targeted flight of math proof; in the face of all those studies suggesting that character is unimportant in determining action, and also the possibility that I am, from your perspective, just a mindless automaton operated by alien puppet-masters, still I knew I had not made up that kitten. I knew it because the person I was, the person I had always been, that person would not do that thing.”

The fallibility of memory and Rosemary’s tendency to not trust her own memory are themes in this book. Here, Rosemary comes to an understanding of herself in which she can accept trusting her memories and what they say about her while also accepting that the memories are likely altered by time and space. By forcing herself to face her hard memories, Rosemary finds her sense of self, suggesting that she and her family’s silence about their past made them forget who they were.

“There were surprises for me, too, which surprised me; I’d thought I was the one with the new information. Most startling was my parents’ insistence that I was the reason we’d never talked about Fern, that I was the one who couldn’t handle it. I hyperventilated at any mention of her name, they said, scratched at my skin until it bled, pulled my hair out by the roots.”

The first part of this quote shows the whimsical and humorous nature of Rosemary’s tone. The latter part describes human responses to anxiety and grief that are very similar to how nonhuman animals react to these same emotions, showing how similar humans and nonhuman animals are. This scene, in which Rosemary finally shares the way that she remembers things with her family, leaves the reader with the question of whom to believe: Rosemary or her parents. It is also possible that the truth exists somewhere in the middle of these two memories.

“Next time, I’ll put things right between my father and me. Next time, I’ll give Mom the fair share of blame for Fern that her collapse forestalled this time around. I won’t drop the whole of it into Dad next time. Next time, I’ll take the share that’s mine, no more, no less. Next time I’ll shut my mouth about Fern and open it about Lowell. I’ll tell Mom and Dad that Lowell skipped his basketball practice, so they’ll take to him and he won’t leave.”

This quote shows the depth of Rosemary’s regret and obviously, she will never get a “next time.” Vince has not been a very likable character throughout this book, and this quote puts that into perspective, showing how he was the scapegoat for many of the family’s problems.